polymnia

tedcranmore said:

I think there is an easy explanation here. It was rumored last summer (Google “Andrew Left predicts Apple acquisition Sono)”, Apple killing the HomePod means this will happen soon. Why support a high-end speaker solution that isn’t selling well when Sonos will provide that product via acquisition?

Sono has a market cap of 5 billion. That’s pocket change for Apple. 

I would love this so much. Selfishly. I own a house full of Sonos gear. And I worry that the Sonos app, that so beautifully allows mixing & matching any/all streaming services & local media into playlists & search, would lose its streaming's service neutrality. If the Sonos app were stripped of that, it would kill a big part of Sonos’ appeal to me. There is reason to be optimistic, with the threat of antitrust litigation, Apple buying Sonos and using their service agnostic app might be a turnkey disarmament solution to antitrust complaints about Apple Music streaming. 

I’m holding out for the Peak Design Mobile, which I learned about right here on AI. Kickstarter is shipping next spring, but I probably won’t have anywhere to go until I get my COVID vaccination anyway. 

Full disclosure, I own an older Diskstation (DS1812+) and even though I am defending the Diskstation's lack of bandwidth, it is exactly that lack of bandwidth that has kept if from being a front-line storage device for my photo retouching workflow. It just isn't fast enough. It has worked nicely for stashing dormant project archives and it is a great host for my Plex and iTunes media.

I'm happy to see the 10GbE & SSD cache drives move down from the expensive Rackstation line to the more budget-friendly Diskstation line. I would love to use a NAS device for primary project storage, freeing my primary Mac workstation from hosting this storage. It would be easier to access project files using my MacBook Pro when I'm away from my desk, not to mention being able to remote into the Diskstation remotely.

sflocal said:

I get that it is a NAS drive, but if this were a Thunderbolt3 system, it would really kick some glutes.  What a bummer.

I think Promise is what you are looking for. Connect the Promise RAID device to a host Mac, then network via Thunderbolt to another Mac.

I assume this is not a terribly robust system since Thunderbolt isn't a common networking connection. Not sure how well it would scale up to more than 2 Macs. Can you just continue to daisy chain Macs until you run out of thunderbolt cables & Macs?

EsquireCats said:

What a compelling reason not to buy Sonos.

It's reasonable to keep a home sound system for 10 years. I'm sure many of you likely have seen people keep systems for far longer than this, but for the sake of the argument it's best to cap it here.

I think this shines well on Apple's efforts to keep their devices relevant - the latest version of iOS is still supported on devices as old as the iPhone 6 (released about 4 years ago) despite the addition of significant features, and the bulk of consumers upgrading handsets between 1 and 3 years.

I’m sure you know that the rest of your A/V components receive limited updates as well.